31 May 2012 11:10 AM

Can there be anything more pitifully selfish than trying to climb Mount Everest in the 21st Century? The stories that have emerged in the last few days, of the young British climber Leanna Shuttleworth picking her way over the dead and dying to reach the summit, and the extraordinary photograph taken by mountaineer Ralk Dujmovitz showing a queue of people 600-deep waiting to take their place at the top of the world has finally convinced me that these people are - mostly - mad as a sack of badgers.

I can, just, see the point of climbing very high mountains. Man vs nature. The fact that it is a very long, very tough walk with a very definite goal. The sheer beauty of the lofty peaks, the lonely magnificence. The feeling that you stand alone among the most dramatic vistas the Earth has to offer. Hillary and Tensing must have felt something like that in 1953.

But no one can feel like that now. Not on Everest anyway, which has become as crowded, filthy and litter-strewn as a busy supermarket car park. It is not the mountain’s fault. It is just there. But the legion of narcissists who decide that they will in some way become a better person and fulfil their life’s ambition by paying a small army of Nepalese people anything up to $100,000 to carry them to the top are a sign that something has gone very badly wrong with our relationship with what we laughingly still call the wilderness.

Let’s look at the stats. The ‘purists’ say that climbing Everest, thanks to better kit and all those willing Sherpas, has become easy. It has not. Above 8000 metres, oxygen levels are too low for a normal human to survive. Some exceptional individuals can manage a few hours at this altitude but most of us cannot and it is not called the ‘Death Zone’ for nothing. Trying to climb Everest without oxygen proves what exactly? That you are a better person? You don’t see astronauts attempting spacewalks without a spacesuit. That is because astronauts for the most part are not lunatics.

More than four people die for every 100 who reach the summit. One in 25 (this figure includes all climbs not just successful summits so the odds of dying on an attempt are a bit less, but even so). That’s worse, far worse, than any other extreme sport including diving, caving, parachuting and so forth. It is actually comparable with the chances of being killed during one of the major offensives of the Second World War. Would you pay £50k to take part in D-Day or the Battle of Kursk? Thought not.

If people want to kill themselves then so be it. But as well we have the callousness on the part of some climbers. In most other ‘extreme’ endeavours, a simple rule applies: if you are aware of another person in distress then, not matter what the cost to yourself in terms of losing a race, money, time and so forth, you must go to the aid of that person.

This can be most clearly seen at sea. If a yachtsman is in grief in a race, the other boats nearby MUST divert to help him, come what may. This always happens, each and every time. Indeed, if a ship or boat is made aware of a sailor in distress and fails to help, the captain can be in very serious trouble indeed, as can be seen in a recent incident involving a cruise liner and some fishermen adrift.

The same, I believe, applies with just about any other form of expedition. If you are down a cave and you hear screams of distress, you do not simply carry on as you were. You drop everything and go to help.

But not on Everest, dear me no. This is a one-in-a-lifetime experience. You’ll be a better, more fulfilled person once you have got to the bloody top. So if some poor soul is lying on the trail, teeth chattering, skin waxy-blue, fingers and toes already long-gone from frostbite and babbling his last from frozen lungs you make a rational decision. You’ve paid a lot of money getting this far. You have spent weeks acclimatising. Hell, you’ve set up a Facebook page to record your personal triumph. It would be wrong to stop now, unfair on all those people supporting you back home. You are raising money for charity. You have to reach the summit, because you’re worth it. And he’ll probably die anyway.

In 2006 about 40 climbers passed a dying British climber called David Sharp without stopping. All of them made the decision in rational terms. He was too far gone. Trying to save him would have endangered more lives. And no doubt these excuses may have just been true. But there are counter-examples that do make you wonder.

Such as when Nadav Ben Yehuda, an Israeli climber, stopped his ascent and carried the injured Aydin Irmak down to Camp 4, on his back, for nine hours describing his decision to abandon his own summit attempt as ‘automatic’. He lost a couple of fingers in the rescue and previously other climbers had passed Mr Irmak, a Turk, without stopping. A week after the David Sharp incident an American team abandoned their climb to rescue Lincoln Hall, an Australian, who survived. In 2007, a Canadian climber called Meagan McGrath rescued a Nepali man called Usha Bista, who was in trouble well into the Death Zone. He too survived. So not all these people are mad or callous. Some are heroes.

Who am I to judge? I could no more climb Everest than swim to the Moon. I am not fit enough, or brave enough. I don’t know anything about ropes, or crampons, or ice axes. Isn’t raising the issue of ethics at 30,000ft while sitting in a comfy chair on a warm sunny day in London a bit like judging soldiers who lose their temper in the heat of Helmand, or of policemen who stray beyond the boundaries of what is allowed during a hot summer riot? Who are we to say? How do we know how we would behave?

But of course there is a difference between the climbers on the one hand, and the squaddies and the cops and so forth on the other. The latter are doing their jobs. They have no choice. If we as a nation make the decision, rightly or wrongly, that the Taliban must be engaged, then somebody is going to have to be sent to do that engaging. If we want law and order someone must be out there on the streets making sure the law is obeyed and order is kept. This is not an excuse for bad policing or war crimes, but it is an acceptance that making a moral judgement in these case is hard at best, probably impossible at worst.

On the mountain it is different. No one has to be there. Every single westerner who climbs, or tries to climb, Everest is doing so out of choice. Mountain climbing is not a job (unless you are a Sherpa) but a luxury, and a pretty decadent one at this level. I have no doubt the lack of oxygen does funny things to one’s brain, clouding judgement, maybe making moral decision making impossible.

I have no doubt that in many cases the decision not to rescue a climber is indeed the rational one. Ms Shuttleworth’s party did stop to try and help one of the injured climbers and concluded that nothing could be done. And of course it would be true madness to try to cart down a dead body. There is a good discussion of what happened last week on this blog and this forum.

But every time a mountaineer says ‘there was nothing we could do’ the names of Mr Ben Yehuda and Ms McGrath must come drifting uncomfortably into their minds. Remember 40 people passed David Sharp. Perhaps none of them could have helped him on their own but if all of them had stopped there is a good chance that he would be alive today.

Everest has become a grotesque lunatic asylum. And, like Bedlam, there is a good argument for closing it down. If it weren’t for the money these peculiar people pump into the local economy, I would argue that there is a very good case for doing just that and putting the mountain into quarantine for a hundred years.

Share this article:

29 May 2012 11:06 AM

“Don’t be Evil’. It is a good corporate motto, as these things go, and certainly better than the banal ‘Working together for a Safer London’, the mission statement of the Metropolitan Police. But Google must be ruing the day it chose these words to symbolise the company as the American computing giant now finds itself in some very murky waters indeed.

The story, as you may have heard (if you haven’t, you can Google it) is that Google’s Streetview cars have been gathering private data as they swoop past our houses, gleaned of unsecured private WiFi networks. Google';s case isn't helped, in thic country, by the strong and in some cases familial links between key Google staff and members of teh government team. As to the databeing gathered, most of it is benign as most of us lead spectacularly dull lives, but there have been reports of emails to illicit lovers being downloaded, information about (legal) pornographic web browsing being linked to particular addresses and of course inevitable fears over things like online banking and credit card details.

When this issue was first raised a couple of years ago the official line from Mountain View was that this was a mistake, the result of excessive enthusiasm from one of its engineering teams who simply thought it might be interesting to see just how much data they could gather from the Streetview project just for the hell of it. Knuckles were rapped, lessons learned and so on.

Now it has become murkier as it is revealed that in fact senior executives at Google not only knew about the privacy breaches but were specifically warned about possible legal problems ahead. Google is still maintaining this line, more or less, and the engineer responsible, a Briton called Marius Milner and dubbed the ‘God of Wi-fi’ is being portrayed as a lone operator, acting without the consent of his bosses. It’s all a terrible mistake, they say, of course we are not using these data for anything sinister. It will all be destroyed.

So whom do we believe? The ‘single rogue operator’ defence is painfully familiar to anyone who has been following the phone hacking scandal. Indeed, so witless is the tactic of a large organisation (such as News International) blaming a single employee for a scandal that quickly went nuclear that you would have thought the Googleguys in California, who are nothing if not clever (and if they were unaware of the details of the News of the World scandal they could have, yes, Googled them) would have seen this coming a mile off. The stated excuses may even be true, in this case, although Mr Milner has used that peculiar quirk of the US Constitution, the Fifth Amendment, to stay schtum.

There are several possibilities. I can imagine that Mr Milner, by all accounts one of Google’s most brilliant engineers (he now works for its subsidiary YouTube) was, at least initially, acting on a wholly freelance basis. Google allows – indeed encourages – its engineers to spend a big chunk of their time, around 25%, developing whimsical, quirky, personal projects that may never see the light of day and yet which may end up being part of the company’s core products. That is how, for instance, Google’s brilliant Skymap app came into being (the one which allows you to point your phone at the sky and it tells you which stars you are looking at).

This bottom-up approach to intellectual and commercial management is one of the keys to Google’s success (in fact it is the key in any really successful company). Google is a company where employees are trusted to a degree rare even in the hippy-dippyish world of mega-IT.

It is certainly why so many brilliant people want to work there. Most scientists and engineers, in my experience, are not driven by money but by freedom to do what they want and to pursue their interests. Google famously treats its employees well in all sorts of ways (the Googleplex HQ has a canteen that serves probably the best food in California, there are the famous free bikes and swimming pools and so forth) but the truth is that salaries are not high by Silicon Valley standards and what really gets the geeks banging on the door begging to be let in is the promise of almost unlimited intellectual freedom, a hierarchy-free no-BS culture and the resources of a $100bn firm to back them up.

So if he WAS a lone operator, was Mr Milner himself being evil? Probably not. He has said that he ‘knows more about Wi-fi’ than he really wants to. I can imagine he is perhaps a mite obsessive. The ability to gather petabytes of data simply by driving a car down the road may have simply been something too, well, fun to not have a go.

And remember this only applied to unsecured Wi-fi networks. As far as I am aware it is not actually a crime in most countries to ‘spy’ on what your neighbours are up to on their computers if they choose not to secure their networks, any more than it is not a crime to peek through their window and see what they are watching on their television. I am pretty sceptical about ‘security’ in general but when it comes to things like on-line banking I accept the need for some basic measures and to be honest people who choose to leave their home network unsecured are brave bordering on reckless.

But that isn’t the point. Just because you CAN peek through your neighbour’s curtains to watch their telly doesn’t mean that doing so is not a bit creepy. Indeed, were you to park your sofa out on the street and watch the footy on next door’s telly because you can’t get Sky you’d probably find yourself troubling Social Services at best and the Police at worst.

The question is, what does Google want the information for? Here we come to one of the great conundrums of the modern age. How on Earth you make a profit, or ‘monetise’, the Internet? When Google was launched way, way back in the Middle Ages (1998) everyone agreed that its web searching algorithms were a work of genius and that Google would change not only the Internet but the world. They were right. What no one could work out was how they were going to make any money out of it.

After all if your business has a core product that is free, it is hard to see the profit potential. The REAL genius of Google is the way its engineers have found a way to match adverts to searches and to mine the countless gigabytes of data that go flowing through its servers every hour for commercial gain. That is why Google is worth $100bn+.

And that is why Facebook is worth rather less. A little more than a week ago, remember, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network site was floated on Nasdaq and the results surprised everyone. Rather than soaring from the initial price of $38 a share to $50 or $60 as was widely tipped, shares rapidly slumped to the low-30s, amid accusations of mis-selling on the part of the banks which has put out the prospectus. Poor Mr Zuckerberg saw his fortune shrivel from $19bn to a mere $16bn more or less overnight. Time to cancel the order for the new Porsche perhaps.

So why isn’t Facebook doing better on the stockmarket? A big problem, surely, is that although Facebook is, like the early Google, a brilliant product, it is hard to see a way of making much money out of it. Most heavy Facebook users are young, and most young people access the Internet not on a desktop or laptop computer with a big screen and a fast wired connection, but on a smartphone with a tiny screen and a slow wireless connection. These phones are often set up to display the bare minimum to save time and space and ads are often unreadable. Facebook’s ‘product’ is the reams of data it holds on a significant proportion (about 10%) of the world’s population. But turning this into hard cash may not be as simple as all that.

If Google is indeed being evil, as its critics attest, we must assume that it, like Facebook, believes that gathering huge amounts of personal data from hundreds of millions of people represents a digital lump of precious metal ripe for mining at some future date. And who knows it (and Facebook) may be right. When asked, people under 25 are amazing unfazed by threats to privacy. In a world full of CCTV cameras, were every citizen carries a portable video recorder which can upload movies to the world in seconds where we assume that every email, every text and every websearch is being snooped upon by someone, even if that someone is just a machine, maybe it is unrealistic to assume we can roll the carpet back to the old way of doing things where a man’s digital network as well as his home was his castle.

I suspect the analogy may be the mobile phone. Lots of people are worried that mobile phones may be frying their brains (they are not, believe me). And yet almost no one chooses to reject this technology because it is just so useful. The same goes for Google.

It is now quite hard to imagine the world without the Internet. It’s like imagining the world before cars and telephones, a different place altogether. And increasingly it is hard to imagine the world without a company whose name has become a verb and whose core product is used by several billion people several tens of times a day. Google is like bread, in other words. So we’d better hope it is not poisoning us.

Share this article:

25 May 2012 6:00 PM

As the Apollo Era slips into history, how long before all the people who took those small steps and giant leaps are no longer with us? Just 12 men walked on the Moon; nine are still alive, but all are old men now. The youngest, Charlie Duke is 76 and the oldest, Buzz Aldrin 82. It is now looking increasingly likely that the number of Moonwalkers will have dwindled to a handful before the next human makes footfall on the Lunar surface. Indeed there is a real chance that they may be all dead.

Two things happened this week to make me think of things Apollo. First, a spacecraft called Dragon finally blasted off into the Florida skies on Wednesday. This unmanned cargo capsule, built by a company called SpaceX, is important as it is the first private spacecraft to be sent on a mission to the International Space Station. Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind SpaceX, hopes this marks the start of a new era of private rocketry, where NASA’s role as the builder and operator of manned and unmanned craft taking people and materiel into low Earth Orbit and beyond is taken over by commercial enterprises.

The second thing that happened this week was that Neil Armstrong (pictured above, one of the rare shots of him on the Moon) gave an interview. It is something of an urban myth that the First Man on the Moon is a recluse. He is not. A softly-spoken and somewhat reserved man, Armstrong frequently gives talks to schools and colleges, attends signings and was until retirement an active member of the Ohio business community, serving on the board of several large companies. He also led the investigation into the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster in 1986.

When journalists say someone is a ‘recluse’ this usually just means ‘they don’t talk to journalists’. In Armstrong’s case this has been mostly true but he gave an intriguing interview this week not to a journalist but to the chief executive of the Certified Practicing Accountants of Australia (you can hear the interview here). So what did we learn?

The hoax-loonies will be disappointed. No admission that the whole thing was filmed by Stanley Kubrick in a Las Vegas warehouse. Instead the sheer hairiness of the first landing is brought vividly into focus. Most of the details have been in the public domain, but Armstrong paints a picture of a mission flying literally by the seat of its pants.

First the on-board computer (about as powerful as the one which operates your fridge) tries to put the Eagle down into a steep crater full of boulders. If this had happened the Lunar Module would have either toppled over or been stuck at such an angle that take-off would have been impossible. Neil and Buzz would have been stuck on the Moon to die.

Happily at the controls was perhaps the greatest pilot in aviation history, a man from whom flying had come as naturally as walking does to most of us. Armstrong calmly took over from the autopilot and flew the LM like a hoverfly, skimming over the Lunar surface looking for somewhere flat and rock-free to land. Eventually, with about 20 seconds of fuel left, he found one.

The chances of success? “Fifty per cent”. The chances of just getting back alive? “Ninety per cent”. That sounds high until you think, that is a one-in-ten chance of NOT making it back. Would any American public agency send a civilian on a mission with those kinds of risks today? I doubt it.

In the interview Armstrong repeats his concerns that America has lost its way in space. Since the cancellation of the Shuttle programme last year the US now has no manned spacecraft at all. Plans for a return to the Moon, let alone a flight to Mars, have been put on hold it seems. There is brave talk of a crewed mission to an asteroid but I’d bet all the green cheese on the Moon that this won’t happen.

So we have to look to the privateers – outfits like SpaceX. Most private space projects are no more than websites but Mr Musk is taken seriously, as are a couple of other contenders including Virgin Galactic. It now seems likely that the Dragon capsule will be adapted to take astronauts into orbit, breaking the Russian-Chinese duopoly. I have no idea when Virgin will start taking paying passengers on the planned sub-orbital ballistic hops; the first flight always seems to be about three years away and has been for about a decade now. But a ‘spaceport’ has been built in Arizona so we must assume the enterprise is serious.

Some weeks ago there was talk of mining nearby asteroids for precious metals. The Google bosses Larry Page and Eric Schmidt as well as the film director James Cameron unveiled plans to send robotic miners extract gold, platinum and other rare metals from small asteroids whose orbits bring them close to Earth.

The problem with this is that it is very hard to see how it could be cost-effective. Gold simply isn’t that valuable. It would cost hundreds of millions of dollars at the very least for a single mission that could bring back a few kilos of the stuff. Of course future technology breakthroughs may make large-scale mining feasible and cost effective but unless the metals and so forth are to be utilised in the colonisation of deep space it is hard to see how anyone is every going to get rich from space rocks.

So where is the space age in this, the fortieth anniversary year of the last Moon landing? In some ways space is quite healthy. In commercial terms low- and geostationary orbits have become a comsat goldmine. A huge robotic rover, Curiosity, is on its way to Mars and will land in August. No doubt we will see more Chinese spaceflights and perhaps a space station by 2018.

But in other ways the heady days of Neil and Buzz are now seeming as remote as the Middle Ages. It will be hard to recapture the enthusiasm of the 1960s (an enthusiasm that was limited even then). Neil Armstrong is right, America has lost its way in space. The trouble is neither he nor anyone else really knows how to put things back on track.

Share this article:

24 May 2012 5:49 PM

There are some tests I never want to have to take. And near the top of the list must be one of those clever exams psychiatrists have devised to see if you have the early stages of Alzheimer’s or one of the other dementias.

There is now, believe it or not, an iPad diagnostic app for dementia. The CANTABMobile test is aimed at GPs who can use it to test aspects of their patients’ memories – it is short-term memory loss that is often the first sign of impending cognitive impairment.

Like conventional pen-and-paper dementia-tests, patients are given a series of questions to pinpoint potential cognitive failings that are specifically associated with dementia and not simply, say, the result of old-age forgetfulness.

So are these tests useful? There is a good dictum which medical students are taught which goes something along the lines of ‘only treat with a view to a cure’. What this means is that if you have a patient who is certainly going to die of a cancer, you do not subject them to painful and traumatic exploratory surgery merely to identify the precise nature and spread of that cancer.

You do not, in other words, traumatise patients with tests whose results cannot benefit them in any way. And my first reaction to these kinds of Alzheimer tests is what is the point?

Alzheimer’s is, essentially, a horrible and incurable illness. What good can it possibly do me to know that I am about to begin, as Ronald Reagan said when he was diagnosed, the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life?

Well, it is not as simple as that. When someone has Alzheimer’s it is not only they who will suffer. Those around them need to be prepared fro what is coming and the more notice carers and loved ones have the better. And although Alzheimer’s cannot be cured, a new generation of drugs can delay the onset of serious symptoms and even in some cases effect a temporary remission.

The time between diagnosis and major impairment used to be a year or two at most; now people can live more-or-less normal lives for years before that long journey into the sunset begins in earnest. Still, I hope greatly that I am never in the position to take one of these tests.

It is not just Alzheimer’s that has the potential to be diagnosed in this way. Advances in genomics are bringing closer the day when we will be able to walk into a doctor’s surgery, give some blood or maybe even a cheek swab and be told with some reliability what our prognosis is in terms of some of the most common hereditary diseases. There are outfits around today who claim to be able to test your genome (for a large fee) and tell you how long you are going to live.

I have seen little evidence that these tests are reliable. But in five, ten years perhaps they will be and then we will face a terrible dilemma. Do I, someone in my late 40s, wish to find out the probability that I wil succumb to Alzhemier’s? No. Heart disease? Yes, certainly, because I think I can do something about that. Parkinson’s? No Huntington’s Disease (for which there is a reliable genetic test today) ditto.

Of course I , like anyone else, can choose not to take these tests. My fear is that in the not-so-distant future employers, banks and especially insurance companies may make this decision for us. Knowledge is a wonderful thing but sometimes it can be very dangerous indeed.

Share this article:

17 May 2012 7:28 PM

And so this peculiar financial crisis continues. A few weeks ago I wrote in this blog that to someone like me, for whom economics appears to be a science rooted in as much logic as homeopathy, many things about the Great Collapse appear to make no sense at all. If the world is getting poorer why are vulgar flats in London now changing hands for tens of millions of pounds? Why are the planes all full? Why are there so many Range Rovers clogging our streets? Why isn’t a euro – even now - worth tuppence-ha’penny? Why is there, clearly, so much money around? And so on.

Now things are getting more surreal. I am writing this from the little town of Palo Alto, the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. Next to my hotel is a snazzy car dealership that specialises in McClaren hypercars and the new Fisker electric limo. I wandered in and the salesman confirmed business is not only brisk but booming.

The number of people who live within five miles of where I am sitting who can pay cash for a quarter-million-dollar 220mph sportscar probably runs into the thousands. “Not just people you’ve heard of, but CEOs of technology startups you have never heard of, their doctors, their lawyers,” the salesman tells me. And from the weekend probably their cleaners and dog-walkers as well.

Because tomorrow the car salesmen are expecting a stampede. For in less than 24 hours the Internet giant Facebook, whose HQ is just round the corner, floats on the stock market, and businesses round here – not just car dealers but taxi firms, restaurants and bars are expecting a boom from the hundreds of instant millionaires that will be crated overnight. This sort of thing did not happen in 1929.

Across the Atlantic we are told that Greece has basically turned into Sierra Leone but the reality is that the place is awash with cash – billions of Euros literally stuffed under mattresses, nearly a BILLION Euros a DAY being extracted from Greek bank accounts via the nation’s cash point machines, wealthy Greeks queuing up in London’s estate agents to slap down million-pound deposits on Notting Hill mansions. This is a lot of money – tens of thousands of pounds’-worth of liquid assets per person - in a country of just ten million people.

No one seems able to agree on what will happen if Greece leaves the eurozone which is strange in itself. Surely the consequences ought to be predictable and, if not, what on earth do all those budding economists do at university? As a financial idiot who wouldn’t know one end of a CDO from another, I can only read the musings of the sages and take my pick of who sounds most plausible.

But the terrifying thing is that no one out there seems to have any more of a clue about this than I do. It seems pretty obvious that in the long run Greece (and probably Spain, Ireland and Portugal as well) would be better off outside the euro than in but, again, if so why not get it over with sooner rather than later and at last let the healing begin?

Which brings me back to Silicon Valley. Of course, this hyper-wealthy corner of hyper-wealthy California is a world unto itself. Economically this is not on planet Earth but Planet Rich. But even so, in a US election year in which the economy, stupid, will be the overriding theme it seems odd to say the least that we are talking about a recession in a world that is so obviously so much wealthier than it has ever been before.

What seems to be happening is that the wealth is becoming more polarised, concentrated in the hands of an elite which is detaching itself from the rest of humanity in a way not seen before since Feudal times. The paradox can be seen most clearly in Greece, a country full of workaholics (don’t believe those lazy stereotypes, the civil servants in Athens may be onto a cushy number but most Greeks I have known work like Trojans from dawn to dusk holding down two or even three jobs), awash with cash and yet, technically, bankrupt.

America teeters on the brink of another recession. We hear dire warnings of a $1trn European hit should the PIGS collapse. And yet we see a waiting list for ghastly apartments in London that look like airport lounges rather than homes, which no one actually lives in and which cost as much as a small Third World country, cars that cost as much as houses flying out of the showrooms and enough cash hidden in Greece’s linen cupboards to send a man to Mars. These are odd times.

Share this article:

11 May 2012 5:18 PM

On our first visit to Australia, we were surprised by the ferocity of the customs rules at the airport. Signs everywhere warned of horrific penalties for the importation of contraband. And we were worried. Because wrapped in flowery paper we were carrying something which, the signs said, could easily land us in the clink.

And the nature of this contraband? Hard drugs? Er, no. Dangerous chemicals? Absolutely not. Firearms? Not us. No, what caused us to march straight through the 'something to declare lane' (the first and only time in my life I have done this) was the wedding present wrapped in flowery paper I was carrying, a nice picture in a lovely wooden frame.

The problem was the frame. Being made of wood it potentially fell foul of Queensland's strict biocontrol laws. Because Australia has had its problems with biological invaders in the past, to say the least, and wood, apparently, is a potential source of perhaps devastating insect pests, such as various beetles and so on, which could - in theory - devastate the nation's forestry industry.

The importance of protecting an island nation against exotic pests has been hammered home this week not in Australia but in neighbour New Zealand, another Pacific Island nation whose fauna and flora, both native and imported, occupy a rather precious ecological niche that would be devastated if outsiders were to get in. In this case it is a fruit fly, from Queensland actually, which turned up in an Auckland suburb. If the fly gets out and breeds, say the authorities, then, potentially, the island's fruit industry could be destroyed.

This sounds like an over-reaction but in fact the arrival of exotic species at the hand of Man is one of the most underreported environmental catastrophes of the last few centuries. This is - usually - a wholly unwitting disaster, but the effects can be appalling.

According to many environmentalists the most devastating object in the world is not a coal fired power station or an atomic plant, but the goat. Goats have been introduced as a supply of food on the coat tails of the great explorations and colonisations of the last couple of centuries and the result has been disastrous.

Across the Pacific, for example, goats have reduced once-lush and varied island ecosystems to bland monocultures consisting of just a few species of hardy shrub and palm. Goats have stripped some islands completely bare, and reduced a few to near-deserts.

The rat, too, has caused devastation. Rodents generally tend to follow people and when they show up where they were never supposed to be the consequences are usually dire for the local wildlife. The most famous - and gruesome - recent example is on Gough Island, also in the Pacific, where ordinary house mice of a kind we think of as completely harmless carried there by ship have turned into vicious monsters, eating alive the defenceless chicks of the Tristan albatross.

In Australia, the deliberate introduction of rabbits in 1859 by one Thomas Austin, one of those peculiar Victorians who seemed to be able to derive pleasure only from the shooting of small mammals, has led to a catastrophic plague. The rabbits have bred like, well, rabbits and have spread over much of the continent, causing millions of dollars worth of damage to the farming industry. Rabbit-proof fences have been built (and been made the subject of a movie) and myxamatosis unleashed, but the rabbits survive. The problem is that Australia has few natural predators - the surviving marsupial fauna is herbiverous - and short of a few game birds, dingos and domestic dogs nothing can keep the rabbits in check.

What is called 'biotic invasion' is probably one of the main threats to biodiversity on Earth far exceeding, say, traditional threats such as hunting in its impact. Sometimes the invaders are obvious, such as rabbits and goats, more often the 'exotic' is something small and unobtrusive - particularly marine organisms which can end up in the wrong place carried there on our boats. In Britain, Japanese Knotweed (Fallopia japonica) has spread unchecked and has proved to be almost indestructible. And the story of the grey squirrels - brash American upstarts - is all too well known.

One solution is to fight fire with fire - introduce ANOTHER species to keep the first unwanted pest (Or a native species which has become a pest) in check. But this can be a recipe for disaster.

In the Thirties, for example, a large amphibian, the cane toad, was deliberately introduced into Australia in the hope that it would rid the country of the cane beetle, which was decimating sugar crops in Queensland. Just 3,000 individuals were released, and it was hoped that the toads would breed in modest numbers and spread throughout the cane-growing region, acting as a natural pesticide.

But the plan was a disaster. The toads turned out to have little appetite for eating beetles, and instead turned their attention to reproduction.

It is estimated that there are now 200 million of them across tropical north-east Australia - 50 for every human Queenslander. Cane toads have themselves become a single-species environmental disaster, outcompeting native reptiles and amphibians and killing native predators when eaten (cane toads are poisonous).

The story of invasive species illustrates the fact that evolution is not just about genes, about breeding, eating and avoiding being eaten, it is also about place. Animals and plants rarely evolve in isolation, but as part of an often rather delicately balanced web of relationships. Put rabbits into a continent that has no foxes or wolves and you will have a problem - especially if you expect to exploit the same continent to grow millions of acres of (also imported) crops.

The trouble is, once the cat is out of the bag there is usually no going back. Ridding the world of excess goats, for example, would be an impossible project. Dealing with the Japanese knotweed is proving to be an almost impossible task in the UK. But, with a bit of luck, New Zealand may have got away with dealing with its alien invasion. That's the trouble with insects - they cannot read customs forms.

Share this article:

10 May 2012 6:04 PM

The Draft Communications Bill does not sound very exciting. But this measure, outlined in the Queen’s Speech this week, contains some very worrying proposals indeed. Basically, if passed, the Bill will allow the police and other authorities access to our Internet browsing history in the interests of fighting crime and combatting terrorism.

As usual, supporters of snoopery will trot out the old adage that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear. This is, in its most fundamental way, true. But the trouble is that as with all these moves what we are seeing is only the thin end of a very long and dangerous wedge. Most law-abiding people have no reason to worry about other people knowing what websites they have visited. But once you give the authorities the ability to do this history tells us that this ability will, inevitably, end up being abused.

To take a (good) analogy, look at the law which allows the Driver and Vehicle Licencing Agency in Swansea to pass on, for a fee, details of car ownership based on license plate. You can (almost) see how this law made some sort of sense at the time. My car is lightly damaged by another vehicle, whose driver may not even realise there has been an accident. No one is injured and the police will not be involved. But I have the miscreant’s number plate details, which I pass on to my insurance company which is then able to access the name and address of the other party, and try to recover the monies from them.

This seems fair and reasonable and is no doubt the sort of thing the government of the day made it possible for the DVLA to pass on driver details to third parties. But what has also happened is something of a national scandal – in exchange for a lot of money, the DVLA is handing out driver details willy-nilly to crooks, conmen and outright gangsters, who then go to the drivers to demand money with menaces for ‘parking on private land’ or suchlike. This is a nasty, seedy little scam about which the management of the DVLA should be thoroughly ashamed.

You can see something happening with a Bill for Internet snoopery. How long before details of what websites I have been looking at are passed on to ‘interested parties’? Of course the Internet itself is quite capable of doing this already, to great effect (the ability of Google to read the contents of emails and suggest linked ads based on this content is as impressive as it is disturbing) but the imprimatur of national security agencies and the police will add a certain sting to this loss of privacy.

You can see how commercial and even family lawyers would love to get access to people’s Internet history for financial or other reasons. If a shaven-headed wheelclamping knuckledragger can get hold of your address from the DVLA, how much easier it will be for a divorce lawyer to gain access to a complete list of websites and emails sent and accessed by the opposing party? How easy it will be for commercial disputes to be ramped up by the full disclosure of all Internet transactions? How long before local councils (which have already been caught out using ‘anti-terrorism’ legislation to justify actions that have nothing to do with terrorism) are given the same powers as the police to see what we are up to online? The point is that when the basic laws are there it becomes very easy to amend and expand their power and scope to suit any interested party that can make a good case for itself. In an era when anyone opposing ‘security’ is labelled a friend of terrorism, it is so easy to see how this sort of expansion can take place.

This is a very slippery slope. Yes the law abiding usually have little to fear from the erosion of privacy but the trouble is this is only the case when we can wholeheartedly trust those to whom we have entrusted our details for safekeeping. The shabby behaviour of the DVLA shows this is not always the case.

The Internet is no longer a hobbyist tool. It hasn’t been so for more than 15 years. It is now as vital a part of our lives, private and commercial, as the post and telegraph were in previous eras. It is not an option. That is why attempts to break open what degree of online privacy exists must be scrutinised very carefully indeed. People who want to regulate the Internet always talk about on-line illegal pornography and terrorism. These are the justifications used also by states such as China, whose restrictions on Internet freedom probably have very little to do with the first and only tangentially to the second and greatly to do with controlling the flow of potentially seditious information that may undermine confidence in the Government.

The security services would love to have more powers to snoop on what we do so. Spooks always do, that is their job. One can argue – and I would agree - that when it comes to high level security threats they must be allowed to get on with it. But requests to steam open letters and to tap phones have always been a very serious matter in this country, a matter for judges and Home Secretaries, GCHQ and shady offices in MI-whatever, not some Town Hall Panjandrum.

The problem with giving the authorities more powers is that they never, ever surrender these powers when they are no longer needed. If a threat wanes (such as Irish terrorism) a new threat is always found to justify a continuation of security measures. That is why there is still a ‘Ring of Steel’ around the City of London. New powers create their own new bureaucracies and like all bureaucracies these will become both self-justifying and self-sustaining. The worst thing is that the real crooks will get away with it anyway, just as the drivers who are unlicensed, untaxed and uninsured are generally safe from the DVLA.

Share this article:

Can someone please explain what is going on with the UK Border Agency? Are its staff lazy? Incompetent? Or merely malign? Is it really their fault or do we need to look elsewhere for blame? Because one story about iffy attitudes or unacceptable queues could be seen as unfortunate, two a coincidence. But now not a day goes past without some tale of eyewatering muppetry on the part of those who police our borders.

Today’s yarn concerns a recent inspection in which it was found that immigration staff were giving random white people arriving on flights from the Caribbean the once-over to avoid being accused of racism when the non-white people were targeted.

So let’s get this right: we are told that staff are overworked and under-resourced, that the chaos and shambles seen at Heathrow and elsewhere is the result of cuts, and yet there is clearly enough time and manpower to allow a bizarre form of reverse racial profiling to take place?

We all have tales of border-queue misery, and most are as enticing as being told about someone’s dreams, but bear with me, I’ll keep it short. Last night I arrived on a Eurostar from Brussels. My passport was checked, in Belgium, by UK Border Agency staff. There were slight queues but the scenes at Gare du Midi were far from chaotic and all was orderly.

Then, on the train our tickets (but not passports) were checked again presumably to stop people booked only as far as Lille getting a free ride to London. But then, at St Pancras, huge queues to get through immigration.

They also wanted to see our tickets, which most people had discarded by then. Of the five passport desks only three, naturally, were manned. This was not a nightmare by any means, but the 15-minute delay was annoying purely because it was unnecessary – why check passports in Brussels and then again in London?

There is a feel of truculence about all this, of work-to-rule, of ‘let’s get everyone angry with Theresa May’. There is certainly very little feel of ‘security’ or crime prevention. The same report which identified racist behaviour also found that passengers carrying illegal drugs were being allowed through on the nod and the wink. We've had surreal excuses for poor performance, the best, i.e. worst, being that old British catch-all of blaming the weather.

Add to this the fact that the hi-tech iris-recognition systems and e-gates installed with such fanfare seem to be working about as well as a Tomorrow’s World gadget-demo and it is clear that problems run deep and fast.

Public attitudes play a part of course and as with other national scandals, such as the great Car Insurance Ripoff we need to look to ourselves not just to others to see where some of the blame lies. We seem to want it both ways - to whizz through airports at the end of our holidays without a moment's delay yet have a ring of steel around Fortress Britain. We probably cannot have both, not without a lot more investment and a lot more tacit approval of profiling.

Our airports are now full of notices warning passengers not to thump the staff. Usually when one is asked not to thump the staff this is a warning sign that one is about to meet staff who will be both obstructive and incompetent. Someone needs to get a grip here, and fast.

Share this article:

07 May 2012 1:23 PM

And so, the airportisation of the world continues. This ugly word – I cannot think of a better one for now – describes the way an increasing amount of public life is starting to resemble the security bubble that comprises the weird alternate universe of the modern aerodrome, a universe where nuns and prime ministerial spouses are deemed potential terrorists and where bottles of liquid become deadly weapons (unless of course they are purchased in Duty Free).

We have seen airportisation creep into other modes of transport. On many trains passengers are now subjected to the same sort of security screening that air passengers face. Get on a Eurostar for example and you will be searched for knives (although, mercifully, you are still allowed to take on a bottle of wine).

This is accepted without anyone really asking the question, why? Of course I could run down a train and murder someone with a knife but then I could do this on ANY train; the fact it goes under the Channel is irrelevant. The reason, of course, is that knives were the weapon of choice for the 9/11 hijackers. But, of course, you cannot hijack a train. If you tried they’d simply turn the electricity off. To compound the illogicality, ‘security’ searches on the Shuttle trains, which carry cars and trucks through the same Channel Tunnel, are cursory. I have been though dozens of times and never had a bag x-rayed.

No one ever seems to stop and ask the question 'is this sensible? Or is it mad?'

How, for example, is a battleship supposed to protect the Olympics (or ‘The Games’ as I see we must now call them for some reason)? This has not been explained.

Perhaps at first sign of bother HMS Ocean (who is paying for this? Me? McDonald's? The IOC?) will start shelling the Stratford Stadium from its Greenwich berth, just as HMS Belfast, moored a couple of miles upstream, so successfully pulverised the German defences at D-Day. Then, after softening up the threat, Ocean’s four assault craft relay teams of crack troops across to the Isle of Dogs to fight their way up through the admittedly mean streets of Docklands before taking on whatever nutter-with-a-beard is causing trouble at t’Games.

Meanwhile, on a rooftop in Bow a bored soldier makes a terrible mistake and flight 275 from Beijing carrying a top-level Chinese trade delegation doesn’t quite make it to Heathrow and instead makes an emergency landing on the Bayswater Road with regrettable results. Oops. And outside the Stadium queues lengthen as thousands of spectators have their bottles of water confiscated to be told they are not allowed food and drink in the stadium or at least they are not allowed any food and drink save the absurdly overpriced rubbish on sale inside. A riot begins as this coincides with the first warm sunny day in the Capital since March.

Share this article:

02 May 2012 3:59 PM

A little more than two centuries ago the British cleric and economist Thomas Malthus made one of the most famous mis-predictions in history. He had noticed that the population of Britain was growing faster than the ability of Britain’s farmers to increase food production. The result, he said, would be famine or war.

That this did not come to pass was down almost entirely to technology. Throughout the 19th Century agricultural improvements meant that food production was not only able to keep up with the population boom, it was actually able to outstrip it. Coupled with international trade, the ability of the industrialised world to feed itself became ever more secure into the 20th Century and by the time the US economist Paul Ehrlich made his neomalthusian predictions in the 1960s that we again faced famine, such cassandras were starting to be mocked.

But we may have reached the limits of what current technology can deliver. The world’s population stands at seven billion – seven times what it was when Malthus wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population, in 1798. And it continues to grow. Even the conservative, best-case-scenario predictions see the human tide topping out at between nine and 10bn by the late 21st century, before platueuing and beginning a slow decline into the 22nd and 23rd centuries. The question is, how are we going to get through the next 70 years, which will see a time when there will be more humans alive than at any period before, or probably after?

As in the time of Malthus, we will need technology and this, I am afraid, means genetic modification of some of our main food crops. I am afraid that the threat by the anti-GM campaign group Take The Flour Back to uproot a field of transgenic wheat later this month which has been planted at a crop research institute in Hertfordshire is not only absurd, but obscene – and profoundly undemocratic.

Since the late 1990s, when the first open-air trials of transgenic crops began in the UK, there have been a series of frankly risible attempts to ‘decontaminate’, or destroy, the plants concerned. The people doing this quote ‘public opinion’ or the ‘precautionary principle’ to justify their actions. But what they are doing amounts to no more than criminal damage by self-appointed environmental guardians who believe they are speaking on behalf of a public they never consult about anything.

Take the proposed ‘decontamination’. The field in question contains a variety of transgenic wheat designed to produce a chemical which protects the crop from attack by aphids. This wheat has not been produced by some sinister multinational, but by scientists at the taxpayer-funded Rothamsted Crop Research Institute, the oldest of its kind in the world. The scientists, who have released a letter this week pleading with the greens to desist, are paid by the British state. As such, their work has a democratic mandate. Destroying this work is akin to breaking into a University library and burning its books. It is destroying knowledge. The sceintists have asked to meet the protesters. This is laudable enough but one is temmpted to ask why they are asking to negotiate with criminals? Bank managers do not ask to 'meet' bank robbers, after all.

Is this what Take the Flour Back wants? The wheat in question has been created with the developing world in mind. The Green Revolution, initiated by the genius Norman Borlaug in the 1960s, has doubled then doubled again yields of staples such as rice and wheat, using conventional cross-breeding. But we are reaching the limits of what conventional farming can achieve.

Think of those figures. Best-case scenario, another 2.5bn humans alive on our planet by 2060 or so. That is an extra China, plus an extra India. And these 'new' people will not be Chinese or even for the most part Indians (places where the Demographic Transition has started to kick in, slowing population growth) but, overwhelmingly, Africans.

Africa teeters on the brink of famine. It only takes a limited drought or a minor war for hunger to start to take hold, even in relatively prosperous countries such as Kenya. Take one example: the Ethiopian famine which formed the backdrop to Live Aid took place at a time (1985) when that country’s population stood at 45m. Today, Ethiopia has a population of 90m and a recent study by the US Census Bureau predicted that by 2050 this impoverished nation will be home to 278m people. One of the things that has always struck me about Africa is how empty the place is, despite its image of ‘overpopulation’ and teeming masses. Clearly, this emptiness will not last.

The reason we see no famine in Ethiopia today is almost entirely due to foreign aid. But how much aid will we need to feed an extra 200m Ethiopians, as well as the rest of Africa’s burgeoning peoples? (the population of Niger is predicted to TRIPLE by 2050, as is that of Nigeria) This is a continent which cannot feed itself today, and according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation Africa will be largely responsible for global food demand increasing by 70% by mid-century.

It is very, very hard to see how we are going to meet this demand. We can press more land into production of course – and wave goodbye to the African menagerie as we do so. We can use huge amounts of extra fertiliser, pesticides and herbicides to extract greater yields from the land we do have, at huge costs to the environment. But, most scientists agree, this isn’t going to be enough. Sometime quite soon something is going to break and famines are going to break out – vast, unstoppable famines which will make the Live Aid hunger look like a walk in the park.

So, we need a rabbit and a hat, and fast. GM technology isn’t the only answer of course. But transgenic technology of the sort being pioneered at Rothamsted promises to be a valuable tool, and denying the right of the world to conduct this research (and, again, this is state-funded, not-for-profit, unpatented science and the team will allow farmers to access this technology at minimal cost if it succeeds) is something of an obscenity.

Like nuclear power, green opposition to GM is starting to look outdated, hysterical and profoundly anti-human. People like Prince Charles and Zac Goldsmith, champions of ‘natural’ organic farming may be well-meaning but they forget they live in a world which cannot possibly feed itself even at current population levels using the techniques they espouse.

In an ideal world we would not need genetic modification at all. In an ideal world we would be eating fresh, locally grown produce that has been mucked around with as little as possible. But this is not an ideal world, as the sky-eyed idealists with the pitchforks and scythes would wish it to be. It is a hot, overcrowded world which is about to get hotter and even more overcrowded. Malthus was wrong – we got away with it. But he may yet be proved right and we may not be so lucky this time. If these wealthy British idealists wish to deny the children of Africa the right to life in the coming decades well, that is their choice. But if famine does stalk the savannahs in the 2050s, then they may care to take a moment to consider just how posterity will remember the people who helped take away one of the tools that could have prevented this tragedy from happening.

Share this article:

MICHAEL HANLON

Michael is Britain’s sharpest and most well-read newspaper science journalist.

As well as writing science features and comment for the Daily Mail, he is the author of five popular science books including ‘Ten Questions Science Can’t Answer (Yet)’ and ‘Eternity – our Next Billion years’ (Palgrave Macmillan).

With his support of nuclear power and dismissal of alternative medicine, Michael has never been afraid to court controversy, and he has managed to enrage both climate change sceptics and believers.